On disequilibrium savings and public consumption

Conclusions A particular aspect of the present paper is the introduction of specific policy measures for the government, whose behavior on the goods market was described in earlier work as purely exogenous, like in Malinvaud. In our context, the government appears as an active economic agent, acting at absorbing any excess supply or reducing any excess demand on the goods market. Though this behavior may look somewhat arbitrary, it has the advantage to force the state of the economy towards a SME if combined with natural endogenous behavior of the other agents! Furthermore, it does not contradict observed policies through which governments stimulate or restrain economic activity via purchases or fiscal and monetary policies. Perhaps alternative policies, like direct actions on the labor market by supplying (non-productive) jobs or unemployment compensations, could have done as well: this remains an open door for further research. The preceding feature also contrasts with the recent work done by V. Böhm (1978) in a macroeconomic set up. In this paper, he studies the stability of stationary Keynesian unemployment or stationary repressed inflation states but without imposing a particular policy on the government. Comparing his work with ours, it is easily verified that if the government would keep its consumption at the levelg ^*, the SME would be stable if the economy starts out in Keynesian unemployment and unstable if the economy starts out in repressed inflation, confirming Böhm's result.Our analysis is related to an earlier work of Archibald and Lipsey (1958), dealing with the adjustment of the economy to a Stationary Equilibrium after a change in real balances. The Quantity Theory of Money postulates that along a SME, a change in the price and the wage rate from (p,w) to (p,w) leads to an adjustment in the level of stationary money holdings from m_i ^* to m_i ^*, m_i ^*=_i ^* (p,w). In this paper, Archibald and Lipsey suggest that the economy follows a sequence of temporary market equilibria: Starting from a change in real balances,prices adjust at each period through a tâtonnement process so as to match supply and demand. Our paper proposes an alternative path: At each period,quantities adjust through a tâtonnement process at constant prices.This paper is a revised version of CORE Discussion Paper 7701. We wish to thank Paul Champsaur, Jacques Drèze, Werner Hildenbrand and Reinhard John for stimulating discussions. We are grateful to Volker Böhm for valuable comments and criticisms.Research supported by the Fonds National Belge de la Recherche Scientifique.